All Six Mass Effect Endings Playing at Once

So there’s been a lot of controversy lately about the ending of Mass Effect 3, and how lackluster it was after 100 hours of investment into the series, but it’s occurred to me not everyone knows what the hell we’re talking about.

As such, there’s a video above that can show you. It plays all six endings based on variants of “good or bad” choices, and shows the differences between them. The issue is, for a game that’s all about choice and how your decisions affect the universe, when it comes down to it, you MUST have one of these six endings, and as you can see, the biggest difference is cosmetic.

And for Mass Effect fans, do I really need to put a SPOILERS tag on this? Duh.

About The Author

Paul

I think I'm a part of the first generation of journalists to skip print media entirely, and I've learned a lot these last few years at Forbes. My work has appeared on TVOvermind, IGN, and most importantly, a segment on The Colbert Report at one point.

Andy

Bioware started the franchise with lofty ambitions, soon realized that they were in way over their heads, and then scrambled to ship something… anything.

The results speak for themselves.

Gabriel

This just in, Bioware continues to piss off everyone who wants a new ending with The final hours release on the forum. I’m so pissed about the damn ending, ugh.

zero

This is pure comedy for me. I knew since the first Mass effect that nothing you did really had any significant impact on the game. It’s mathematically difficult to implement.

A single decision point will produce two outcomes. If there are two decision points, then there are 4 possible outcomes. If there are 3 decision points, then the outcome possibilities become 3!x2!x1!. In layman’s terms, each decision point exponentially increase the number of possible outcomes.

There are more than 3 decision points in this game, and that’s why your previous decisions don’t matter to the final outcome. I mean come on folks, you are either naive or stupid. Mass Effect is an ok game, but it’s over hyped as F@#%. It’s no better or worse than COD with all things considered.

trashcanman

Why did the video stop early? There was a whole other scene (not including post-credits, at least one of which implies Sheperd is still alive). I have to admit that the ending is underwhelming in a great many senses, but not in the end of the world sense that I’m getting from message boards and whatnot. I think people literally expected Bioware to create an entirely new video game based around every single possible choice in the game. That is just unrealistic and stupid. And holy hell, Zero, acting like ME is not a million miles ahead of the “shoot anything that moves and shout oo-rah” of COD is trolltastic. Pretty sure you didn’t play them, otherwise you’d know that a lot of things come back from game to game. For example, if you got Tali kicked out of the Quarian fleet in ME2, when the opportunity comes to halt the genocidal war between them and the Geth, her people won’t listen to her and you are forced to choose which race (and corresponding comrade) dies. If you think that is not a significant impact, I guess COD is the way to go for you. All things considered, ME has given us only one thing to complain about, and that thing is “we want more”. Not really a terrible situation, when you think about it.

Zydoxis

Holy crap! How do you get the Destroy: Vaporization ending?! You’re only supposed to be destroying Synthetics, so WTF is going on there?…lol.

TimFads

Perfectly done! Bravo!!!

Beth

Actually from what I understand there are twelve actual endings, but even if you show just six you’re not showing the entirety of the endings. SPOILERS (I suppose) You have the scene with Normandy crash landing, oh, and Shepherd still being alive on Earth at the end of Destroy/Good. If anything your compilation as shown that there is a difference in the endings, and for that I thank you. It’s nice to see there was a way to mess things up entirely (Vaporization).

For me the ending itself wasn’t the biggest issue, just the lack of closure. I wanted to know what happened to everyone at the end. Besides that the games are still very good, and I still want to play them. I do hope they come out with something else, and by the sounds of all the media talk they’re definitely up to something.

Vonter

Haven’t played the games, but I’m supposing people wanted several endings, like in Chrono Trigger. I don’t understood what happened on the endings but they all look the same except from some color variation.